Monster Nation
Page 30
A rumbling vibration shook the room. A vast emergent noise—a whale turning over in the darkness below the ocean. A mountain falling down in another country. Except it wasn’t a sound at all, was it? Dekalb felt it on the back of his neck.
The energy—the dark energy. It was rising, moving. Something—something dead was moving. Something undead. Dekalb peered between the blades of the turning fan, studied the wedges of yellow and purple light he could see, the featureless sky beyond his hiding place. Nothing there—the thin texture of stratospheric clouds, the soundless sky where no airplanes flew anymore, where no one went, cold and frozen and lifeless and empty as the day the earth began.
She kept coming east, but of course, you know what she must have found here. She never saw Mael Mag Och again, at least not that he remembers…
“I said shut up!” Dekalb croaked, summoning enough energy to look over his shoulder.
Gary looked back at him with bloodshot eyes.
Shivers of fear stabbed out of Dekalb’s dry adrenal glands, making his kidneys ache. It was impossible. It was impossible but it was real. Somehow Gary was healing himself. Rejuvenating himself. The whole time while Dekalb had been absorbed in fanciful stories of invisible dead girls and armless freaks Gary had been making himself over and anew.
“What have you done?” Dekalb wheezed.
The skull on the floor rolled its eyes. You’re imagining things, old man. Come lie down again and I’ll tell you another story.
Dekalb summoned the mummies to take him down from his hooks but he didn’t want to lie down on the catwalk again not with that… thing looking at him.
The mummies did his bidding. While Dekalb sat propped up against a girder they searched the supply closets. One of them returned with the necessary tool. She stepped up behind the skull and raised her arms, rotten linen spilling away from her body, softened grey skin showing underneath.
I think you’ve really lost it this time, Dekalb. There’s nothing to—
She brought the sledgehammer down, brought its five pound head down on the skull, shattering the bones, spilling dry dark brain matter across the floor. The bloodshot eyes spun comically in their sockets and ended up pointing in two random directions, neither of them looking at Dekalb.
It had been totally necessary. Dekalb knew it in his bones. He felt guilt burn in him, and it felt like his hunger had returned.
Beyond that, much larger if not so well-defined, he felt loneliness creep into the room like twilight. Dekalb did not sleep, none of the dead did, but he had allowed himself to become so decrepit and dilapidated that his brain could wander for hours at a time, whole days when it chose to, lost not in thought, no, not in anything so conscious and concrete but instead wandering through mist, through grey nothingness. It was a kind of unconsciousness. He shut himself down, then, to get away from the loneliness, the weakness of his body, the guilt. He returned to himself in time, just as he always had before. Days had passed, he thought. The mummies couldn’t tell him—their sense of time was numbed by their sense of immortality. Yet it looked like the light had shifted enough for it to have been days. It was time, time to return to himself. Time to figure out what came next.
In his half-sleep his body had tumbled down across the catwalk and the lattice of metal there had cut into his cheek, making an obscene checkerboard of his face. The mummies came forward, two of the strongest, and they re-arranged him, re-positioned him on the floor. They let him look at the skull.
It didn’t look as bad as he’d thought before. It didn’t look so bad at all, really, though you could see the cracks where the hammer came down. The eyes still pointed in random directions.
Except when one of them swiveled around and focused on Dekalb’s face.
Dekalb was well beyond the ability to shriek, or else he would have.
Table of Contents
Prologue
PART ONE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
PART TWO
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
PART THREE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
PART FOUR
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen